Germaine Greer

[IamTheWhoreofBabylon]

i never post here but I'm watching Germaine Greer on newsnight
Crazy, the woman is not allowed to discuss feminist issues without being forced to discuss transgender issues
Disclaimer- I really like GG
Am I reading this correctly? Why does she have to fight for a different groups issues

I read a really funny exchange on jezebel. This lad called Benjamin is very angry with GG and her er...terftitude. Anyway, he said that it was time for her to move aside and let contemporary feminists do the talking now. He was challenged for his ageism, which he denies in the strongest possible terms.

He meant contemporary as in modern, not young and bleated about how, if we aren't using words with agreed meanings, then we can't converse.

I would have had to have set up an account to tell him that he essentially agrees with GG but I couldn't be arsed.

The man I saw on Sky News said of his anticipated journey from being a gay man to his idea of femininity: 'If I knew I didn't have to get off at Gayville but there was a stop called Transtown...'

Imaginary music swelled at that point while I stuck two fingers down my throat.

How long do you think he rehearsed that line in front of a mirror in anticipation of a media career?

Boak.

sillyoldfool I wanted to cheer reading that blog!

Why are these voices being drowned out?

I mean, I know why, but that was more a cry from the heart...THAT is what the debate should look like.

Nothing has changed, we have made so few real increments into equality, and the grief that GG is getting as an older woman is living proof of this. Her age is constantly referred to, her looks commented on. I am on the edge of menopause and it has come as quite a shock to realise how much of my currency has been my looks alone, how much less men pay lip service to listening to me now that I am no longer 22. I really couldn't care less what a few blokes "identifying" as women think/do/wear. I care that women in middle age are almost unemployable (read "the invisible woman" for emplyment stats, horrifying). As a victim of male violence and a mother of girls I care that most of the violent crime against women is by men. That when walking alone on dark Winter nights I feel a tick of panic when a van driven by a man slows. That my brilliant daughters will be more acceptable because of their luck in being beautiful. That when they reach 50 they will be sidelined and expected to have their faces frozen or cut into to be considered beautiful still. That in much of the world women and girls are bought and sold like cattle. Abused, their genitals disfigured, their bodies used as commodities. If you are born a man, you got lucky in life's lottery. If you want to wear a bra and call yourself Lulu, go ahead. But don't trample all over the issues that real women face every day. Same old male privilege, with nail varnish on.

Sorry if this is just the wrong place, but I'm in haste shouldn't be here but the thread in AIBU about a possible trans son has had me thinking & thinking. I don't want to go into that thread myself to post coward but has there been some good feminist input?

I suspect the boy may be nervous/anxious/scared of the increasingly hypermasculinity pushed on kids today, or gay but not able to leave the safety of heteronormativity & all the privilege that it confers (and I say that as a female hetero - I've always been aware how much shit I avoid by conforming to heteronormative behaviours.

I think there's a sort of gentleman's agreement that those of us who know that women don't have dicks don't post on support threads.

However, I would totally agree with you that it's a mixture of toxic masculinity and a rise in homophobia that has caused the upsurge in trans* self diagnoses.

Don't worry Blackbird - her DS says he's 70% sure and has been thinking about it a week and there have been a lot of sensible people saying that the first step is to talk to a counsellor to understand how her DS feels and what he's really feeling rather than taking any quick jumps.

There have also been people sharing their own experiences (or of their friends) of feeling confused as teenagers and then either a) coming to terms with their changing bodies or b) discovering they were gay rather than born in the wrong body.

THanks all. This is why I teach as much feminism as I can sneak in to all my courses (I used to run a postgrad Women's Studies programme but where have they all gone?). It's almost worse for young women and thinking young men than when I was growing up in the late 70s Depressing. THat thread had me dreaming about it. Stupid isn't it - some random unknown boy and his mother making me lose sleep!

I posted on the AIBU thread (unaware of the gentlemen's agreement). The mother is gender critical and feminist and sounds both supportive of her confused son but wary of predetermined outcomes of 'yep, you must be trans' from entering the counselling process.
Her feeling is that her son is generally confused about his developing body and society's expectations of manhood. I think it's really important for a teenager to get some input along the gender critical lines. There's such a zeitgeist at the moment and especially where children are concerned I think it's important to hear the alternative.

I'd agree, but I tend to shy away, given my views, of threads asking for support in that area.

In my view, giving puberty blockers and offering surgery to minors who have got the trans* is child abuse.

Jack Monroe has written the inevitable article about Greer, Jenner and herself but I think she misses the point a bit, as its radfems like Greer who want gender to be reconstructed, and she doesn't seem to get that sex and gender are different things.

I used to like Jack and followed her on Twitter but after a while her tweets started to consist mainly of retweeting people who'd insulted her, in the hope of her fans piling on them. It got very tedious.

I just realised I used the wrong pronouns for Jack, but it's late and I can't be arsed going back and correcting myself!

Jack is back to the stereotypes of wanting to play with her brother's meccano set therefore not feeling girly. Why didn't she become a civil engineer in that case rather than growing a beard? It's all so superficial the changes they make. If it's the meccano set you want ask for the meccano set. You don't need a beard to play with meccano.
The sexual abuse she got when younger was awful but pretending to be a man and having a mastectomy won't make it all go away.
It does seem to be giving her attention though and a lot of prominent transexuals seem very attention seeking.

That article! Argh!

"aren't we all a bit non-binary inside"? Aaaaaaarrrghhhhhhh! What on EARTH could this possibly mean? It's DEVOID of thought and nuance.

Conchita Wurst is a drag act and makes no secret of it. It's utterly facile and meaningless to pretend that he says anything at all about transsexualism or transgenderism (except for the obvious misogyny of drag).

I've had a hysterectomy, as it goes, and at a young age. I'm still a bloody woman, for god's sake! And I don't like my situation being co-opted like that, with people crying "look, you're being told you're not a real woman, aren't you offended by that?". No, I'm not, I just think it's a ridiculous thing to say.

I wonder was it this thread that Jack read? Because all the analysis seems to have passed them by in favour of just yelling "yer all meanies and trollz!".

No, there was another thread discussing her specifically - that's the one she's referring to.

That article pissed me off too - although I did laugh out loud at the response to Greer and saying that women who shave their pubic hair and don't have smelly vaginas must not be real women. How fucking ridiculous.

I don't think Jack will have seen this thread before writing the article because Jack wasn't mentioned. Now we've used their name though, their google alert will possibly bring Jack here.

If she wants to know why she couldn't have the meccano set, she could try asking her parents.

I get hating your own body. When I was a teenager I hated it for the opposite reasons - my breasts were too small. Teenage boys and girls can be mean about girls with small chests. Fried eggs on an ironing board was one I heard more than once.

It seems that Jack would have preferred my boobs instead of their own and I would probably have been happy to swap!

But it seems wrong that Jack feels it's their body that's the problem, rather than societies for making them feel that way. And I think that's wear body hatred becomes body dysmorphia. I saw on another thread that being trans is not a mental illness but surely it is? I'd always assumed it was part of things like eating disorders and people who have endless amounts of cosmetic surgery.

Just saw this article on my Facebook feed and thought it hit the nail on the head really. Transgenderism as "the latest anti-feminist wedge of the left"

www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/10/28/4340688.htm

didnt see it but agree with OP. hope GG had the wits to call the interviewer out on this. HOWEVER,, I'm a fan (kind off), but she does like the sound of her own voice and often seems to require little encouragement to go 'off topic'.
I like the other Greer better, the American one. I don't think they are related.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3297734/Death-free-speech-Germaine-Greer-branded-transphobic-student-feminists-academic-attacks-self-righteous-zealots-censoring-history-literature-crushing-debate-universities.html

Brilliant Daily Mail piece.

There's 4 words I never thought I'd type.

Freshwater Selkie
"aren't we all a bit non-binary inside"? Aaaaaaarrrghhhhhhh! What on EARTH could this possibly mean? It's DEVOID of thought and nuance.

Not only that, it also is devoid of meaning. Or at least, devoid of the meaning they want it to have.

We are not "a bit non-binary inside" we are all completely not at all binary inside, because a person's sex has no influence on their interests and a personality can't be "female" or "male". Only bodies can. (Unless maybe they were talking about inner organs? I'm afraid my uterus is rather binary, sorry.)